I think there is a passage in Arthur Clarke’s “3001: The Final Odyssey” when the inhabitants of 31st-century Earth ask astronaut Frank Poole, a revived 21st-century man, whether he ever met any of the Founding Fathers. (I’m not completely sure if I have that right. I read the book over a decade ago, and it is easy to mix things up over time.)
Maybe Bluto said it best in “Animal House” when he tried to motivate his friends into action: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!”
Close enough? Perhaps someday, but not quite yet.
However, a thousand years from now, it may not even be well known among the general public that Germany was America’s foe in a 1940s war that involved a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor (or was it the World Trade Center?).
Indeed, maybe it is already being forgotten at the distance of not quite a century.
What about something really big, though? Will we always be able to place a watershed moment of our humanity (or inhumanity) into the correct historical, cultural and sequential context?
Take, for example, the Holocaust.
It does have a museum on the National Mall, so that will help. It is the largest genocide in recorded human history, and there are not that many people who can name another genocide or two (or more). So, it will probably not be crowded out of our minds or confused with something else — unless there is an even bigger genocide on the way. Of course, remembering the Holocaust is supposed to prevent genocides from happening again, so there is nothing to worry about on that score, right?
But, bit by bit, some of the relevant details are already slipping away. Last week’s coverage of the story about U.S. Marines posing in Afghanistan with an SS flag reminded me of this. (Huh, did you notice that? I forgot to call it a Nazi SS flag, thus stripping it of the important context.)
I have a long-standing personal policy against trying to make judgments about what is or is not happening in a war zone based on what I read on the Internet. I am not even going to nibble gingerly around the edges of how and why this incident happened, who is or is not responsible, and what should be done about it. I am sure all that will sort itself out in short order.
What struck me most about the story was the notion, whether accurate or not, that the young Marines who posed with the SS flag did not realize it was a Nazi SS flag. If the flag had borne a swastika — one almost does not have to say Nazi swastika — this excuse would seem implausible. For now, and maybe for as long at the Thousand-Year Reich was supposed to last, the swastika is an indelible primary symbol of Nazism. Surely nothing will change that. It is like the ancient ankh, which everyone knows is the Egyptian symbol for…something…
Gene Simmons’ mom survived a Nazi concentration camp…
In the minds of most young people today, is the SS as firmly and automatically associated with Nazis and the Holocaust as some who have reacted strongly to this incident insist that it should be? Or is this something only diehard KISS fans of an older generation would instantly realize?
Notwithstanding later protestations to the contrary (“No, not the SS, the Waffen-SS!”), the SS was the Nazis’ main arm for carrying out the policies dictated by Hitler’s Final Solution. But, indeed, SS troops also made up an elite military force, and maybe a young Marine is as likely to focus on that aspect of their existence as are the makers of high-quality action figures:
“Look, Ma, no swastikas!”
It is interesting to note that the creators of one of the most popular combat simulation games, the “Call of Duty” series, apparently decided that just plain old Nazis were not scary enough, so they came out with a scenario involving Nazi zombies. Maybe the evilness of the SS will not be driven home with young people until they make a game with SS vampires and werewolves. Perhaps they can even sell action figures. (On second thought, these would only join similarly themed films and graphic novels that already serve to make Nazis “cool.”)
In Lithuania and Latvia, Soviet symbols such as the hammer and sickle are outlawed along with Nazi emblems. Stalin and his zombies killed millions while shiny red stars twinkled in the communist firmament. Today you can see Russian hockey fans waving Soviet banners and wearing Bolshevik hats as nostalgic totems of a lost “greatness” they wish to bestow upon their national team. Maybe we should start thinking about opening a Museum of Communism on the National Mall — one without a gift shop selling Che Guevara t-shirts.
All these matters are about the here and now, or the next little while. What about in a thousand, or even two thousand years? Or longer. Other than what I know from watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and from going to the traveling King Tut exhibit in San Francisco, whatever lessons should be kept uppermost in mind from ancient Egypt’s long and rich history are lost on me. Will the memory of Tahrir Square’s Arab Spring fade away unless someone builds a pyramid there?
Everything I know about Egypt I learned in the gift shop…
And what about the Holocaust? How many centuries will it be before our average minds will lump SS lightning bolts in with, say, a tricorn hat as something the Minutemen wore? (“Weren’t the Minutemen supposed to be ready in a flash, dear?”) Over time, details such as the connections we are expected to make between the symbol and something evil may slip away. Could that mean our broadly shared knowledge of the essential fact that millions were systematically murdered will also eventually subside?
Many say this is exactly why we must be vigilant for slippage, and that everything possible should be done to preserve the memories and the historical record of the Holocaust. So that we do not forget. So that it does not happen again. I wonder how long, at the most extreme range, such an effort can be effectively sustained. It may be that this incident in Afghanistan — though certainly not the reaction to it — already hints at the inevitable cumulative result of our loss of touch with more and more of the details.
Even with the Holocaust still in our living memory, there have since been a number of genocides in human society. A few centuries from now, or in a thousand years, it seems likely that there will be much less readily accessible socio-historical information in our brains about the downsides of genocide on the grandest possible scale.
We are repeat offenders as mass murderers just decades after the Holocaust, even while all the symbols and details remain fairly well catalogued in our minds. In future centuries, what might be the result of even less personal awareness? Will this make us as susceptible to killing as an organized and “necessary” scheme as we were in the century that recently ended? Could it be that we are inclined to be that way no matter what we know or remember?
Keeping an eye on the use and understanding of potent symbols has value. As we do so, we would like to believe that what is relevant and important to us now — or what our parents and grandparents told us mattered — can be made enduringly so. But if we seek reflections of lurking threats to our best intentions to always know and recall history’s lesson, we should look no farther than into the mirror to see the unfurled flag of potential evil. Those same uncaring, unknowing eyes will always be looking back at us, long after our minds have forgotten what we must remember about the millions, and even while we ignore the victims of some new millennium.
“Wake me up when you’ve got it figured out…”
Thus, the most telling and troublesome symbols whose appearance we must watch for are the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur — and whatever place comes next. These are the jagged lightning bolts that should be met with thunderously loud questions about what is going on, who is responsible, and what we are going to do about it. Let us hope our individual outrage at the sight of offenses such as these will always be a thousand times greater than our personal indignation over misused symbols. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case.
The devil is in the details, and we can and should be aware of the details of our history. It will help, perhaps for a very long while. Yet, while Frank Poole is still sleeping, maybe we can use the time to learn to kill less, and to care more. If we do, and if we are very lucky, this could also lead to something that may help us, perhaps forever.
It does ring a bit hollow when people are so quick to pay obligatory humanist lip service in the form of “we must never forget!” And fail to muster any public indignation towards contemporary amnesiacs. (You forgot the Armenian genocide!)
Those people, of course (I mean those who perpetrate modern genocides), haven’t necessarily forgotten anything. Many do not believe what they’re doing is genocide or even comparable to other genocides. I would say this is evidence enough that the capacity for atrocity is native to human nature, needing no precedent nor example. It it is simply a (seemingly) logical endpoint in a particular sicio-cultural thought progression that stems from social, political, and economic desperation and a fear of the other.
I think people are trained to focus on the trees. Anyone can recognize a swastika, but very few people can recognize in their own thinking and discourse the socio-cultural precipitations that ultimately gave the swastika its sinister connotations. And I’m not talking about simple racism.
“Those people, of course (I mean those who perpetrate modern genocides), haven’t necessarily forgotten anything. Many do not believe what they’re doing is genocide or even comparable to other genocides.”
Indeed, they’re often meticulously following a tried and true recipe. The perpetrators will see it as a necessary measure to achieve their aims — security, justice, loot, etc. — and the label others apply won’t matter much, especially when no one is willing or able to do anything to stop them.
I hesitated to write this at all, because one so obviously has to agree that killing is such a fundamental and seemingly immutable part of our nature that all the rest of these considerations probably just amount to chatter.
But the hypocrisy of it all — the way we are so very wise about the tarnished pennies and so annoyingly foolish about the pounds of human flesh — gets under my skin sometimes. And the fact that so many who jump into the conversation are themselves ignorant of the relevant context makes it all just that much more engaging.
So, I decided to write about it, pointless though it may be.
I guess I didn’t mean to imply that it was pointless at all.
I was agreeing with you–or thought I was.
That there’s a sort of socially conditioned mal-arrangement of priorities when it comes to things like this.
No, I came up with the pointless thing all by myself. I tried to brush it aside with various throwaway lines like “Could it be that we are inclined to be that way no matter what we know or remember?” and such, but this business about our killer nature really is the crux that makes all the musings about the durability of memory and associations a little bit (or a lot) irrelevant.
But, yes, the mal-arrangement of priorities is what I really wanted to get at. I just had to dress it up in some pseudo-social science babble the way I often do when I don’t want to just come right out and say something from the get-go.
An afterthought: Actually, whether these things are relevant to this proclaimed crux isn’t really all that important, now that I think about it. It is, and always has been for me, of stand-alone interest to examine the ways historical perception mutates, and how, through arrogance or ignorance, we try to stop it, or we accelerate it. Yeah, that was an equally strong impetus for me with this one. It was two pimples, and it was worth creating a nose between them to set up a satisfying double pop.
God. I typed the above on my phone, and I feel like it reads just terribly.
Why is that? Why does not being able to see the entirety of my text field change my voice? Does this happen to anyone else?
Same reason an artist needs to see the whole canvas at intervals? (Or, same reason you need to see a nostril crease pimple in the mirror to really get the right finger position and apply the proper squeeze pressure to do a good job of popping it?)
“Many do not believe what they’re doing is genocide or even comparable to other genocides.”
I agree strongly with this statement, and particularly to the latter half of it. I doubt the people involved in planning or carrying out a genocide are really thinking about other genocides and how awful they were. Rather, they – like everyone – are involved in carrying out their own wishes or orders and just pick and choose what they believe and remember.
Anyway, that was a very interesting essay. I studied history at university and one of the things I things that – ironically – I remember, is that people seem to pick and choose from history. History changes because it exists in our memories and books that can be burned, rewritten, or ignored. Priorities and ideas change, and thus so do the lessons of history.
Take, for example, China, where I’m currently living. (*Note to the govt censors – please ignore this! I love you!) They change history all the time based on their current priorities. I mentioned General Tso’s Chicken to my students this week and they said, “Who?” So I looked him up and he’s related to the Taiping Revolution (but not to any chicken dishes). The Taiping Revolution was held in high regards by the Communists when they themselves were revolutionaries… but nowadays they are the villains as the Communists attempt to keep stability.
I choose China only because it’s easier to see the flaws in another society. There are plenty of examples in West, too.
“History changes because it exists in our memories and books that can be burned, rewritten, or ignored. Priorities and ideas change, and thus so do the lessons of history.”
This process of mutating perception is even more interesting in societies like China, because the process is top-down, and people are conditioned over time to internalize, to self-censor, the resulting “memory.” Because the process of altering historical perception is itself linked to the objectives of governance, it has its own immediate historical significance as an indicator of goals, fears, and priorities. When a society emerges from this kind of experience (such as here in the Czech Republic), there is a bottom-up process of reevaluation and re-discovery — of reshaping perception — that is quite interesting.
It’s fascinating. Back at school I used to have a professor who liked to make us do the reading on some topic and then just pull the rug out from under us. He’d always delight in pointing out that everyone has some sort of bias that makes everything unreliable. He was like a Bond villain that way. I can only describe it as like standing on a boat in choppy seas now whenever I try to study some element of history. I never really know who’s made up what and why… But then, it’s probably better to know to be skeptical than to assume otherwise. I guess.
Even vaunted original sources are suspect, because participants and contemporary observers of the history that is being made, or has just happened, often have a stake in the immediate perception. Take Napoleon sitting on St. Helena doing a really bang-up job of PR that would last for more than a century. Or apologists for the Confederacy who did such a good job of emphasizing that secession was about “states’ rights” that you can still get a sharp argument today about the fundamental nature of the Civil War.
When you talked about China, something else that came to mind is the notion that the Internet gives us a greater ability to catalogue and retain information for future public access. But I think China stands as a good example of why that isn’t necessarily the case. And, even in a freer West, more accessible information also means more ways to promote a particular bias, and less chance of being able to sort things out while the boat is rolling on the vast choppy sea of information.
So much of this overlaps with my ongoing (though recently amplified; must be an election year) obsession with manufacturing consent.
I post so much crap about it on Facebook, both you and David have probably seen this, but in a democracy where censorship is considered to be in exceedingly poor taste and likely to incite riots, you end up with a situation in which “the powers that be” simply hijack the masses’ modes of expression (and the masses themselves!) to paint reality any color they like.
http://xkcd.com/1019/
It’s such a simple thing to do, and so powerful.
Even more impressive is that you don’t HAVE to pay them. People move about in their private lives promoting the official line every day based on what they hear and read and perceive public consensus to be. We are all, to some degree or another, carriers of this propaganda virus and we spread and spread and spread it.
Messed up.
Like,
Hm. Guess I was going to say something else.
Can’t remember what, though!
It’s almost as if the Internet has taken us full circle back to the days when anyone with a printing press could crank out handbills and pamphlets and do some rabble-rousing with them. Of course, relatively speaking, a computer is much cheaper now than a printing press was then, and you can potentially reach a much bigger audience on the Internet than you can on the town square.
If putting these “means of propaganda” into the hands of The People was supposed to be a good thing, I’m not sure it isn’t without some major downsides. We don’t have more access to information, but a greater abundance of misinformation and disinformation. And, yes, it’s quite easy to manipulate the typeset and change the font size on today’s broadsheets, even after they’ve already been printed.
At the same time, we’re being herded more and more into a way of thinking about all our choices — where we eat, what we watch, where we buy, who we vote for — that says it’s important to know what others (especially our “friends”) are choosing. I think the Fuehrer of the future will be staring out at us on digital billboards that say “He Is Our Friend.”
Wait ’til they start mobilizing flash mobs armed with machine guns…
Were it only broadsheets!
Smaller, individual blogs are kind of like that, but the ones that are, not enough people read them for them to make a difference.
Anything that’s actually read by any appreciable number of people is bought and sold, often in terms of money, yes, but also in terms of opinion, popularity, etc. The better-known you are, plainly, the less you can actually say, the more important that your perspective be one among the acceptable handful sanctioned by the going zeitgeist and what Chomsky called the “propaganda system” that is built into an adevertising-based media.
Anyway.
Yeah.
The internet is just a sort of over-the-top example of the illusion of free press. People can and do say anything, but most people who are actually read are all saying the same thing, and though that thing is neither necessarily correct or “right” in the moral sense, there is assumed righteousness and safety in perceived consensus, so the ideation–whatever it may be–is self-sustaining.
Wait. What was the question again?
“…but most people who are actually read are all saying the same thing, and though that thing is neither necessarily correct or ‘right’…there is assumed righteousness and safety in perceived consensus, so the ideation–whatever it may be–is self-sustaining.”
Detouring off the subject a bit, this is one of the things that goes wrong with intelligence analysis…
And then the awful thought arises, like a bloated something in a warm pond, that maybe we have to kill to remember to care.
Well, I suppose that’s the part of our psyche at which cries of “Remember the Alamo!” or “Remember Pearl Harbor!” are aimed. There’s no better way to show that you care and remember than to exact revenge.
A brilliant, perhaps Nietzschean, thought. But I wonder how much guilt plays a role in the dynamics Darian describes. An awkward syllogism, “Never forget!” only carries us to the admonition “Never again!” when guilt plays the middle term. And guilt is funny like that. Heap enough on and the guilty stop feeling guilty, and then they forget.
“Never forget!” is the cry of the priests and scholars. “Never again!” is the sales pitch of the politicians and arms dealers.
There’s a multi-faceted guilt angle at work in the larger picture here, but I’m loathe to examine it, because…Well, just because…
In some ways, I suppose the upside of this (if you could call it that) is that the lesser master symbols associated with Nazism have lost their potency because the campaign of information attached to them has been obscured in an era no longer informed by their empowering propaganda–the symbols were designed by Nazis and meant to invoke their values, not those of their opposition. However, seeing people embrace the aesthetic divorced from the ideology and context is unsettling, to say the least–even when they’re being used as a convenient shorthand for “evil.”
See also:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is pulling a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt from its shelves after a Maryland blogger complained that the image was identical to a Nazi SS emblem from World War II…
… “We are deeply sorry that this happened, and we are in the process of pulling all of these T-shirts from our stores,” Tovar said. “Respect for the individual is a core value of our company and we would never have placed this T-shirt on our shelves had we known the origin and significance of this emblem.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15702868/ns/business-us_business/t/wal-mart-pulls-t-shirts-nazi-skull-logo/#.T0PW3pixN8w
Thanks for the Wal-Mart story from ’06. Another twist: Maybe Wal-Mart ripped off the design from a clothing company…
http://consumerist.com/2006/11/walmart-ripped-off-nazi-shirt-from-graffiti-writer.html
And this reaction from the guy who appears to be the original designer is interesting:
http://consumerist.com/2006/11/fairey-responds-to-walmart-ripping-off-his-nazi-shirt.html
Then the U.S. Congress got into the act:
http://schakowsky.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1657&Itemid=17
By the way, for anyone who’s interested, I thought this piece about the incident itself was interesting:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/exclusive-marines-nazi-flag-whistleblower-talks
In connection with the SS, I think the Malmedy massacre might be a good teaching opportunity for a target audience of young U.S. Marines and soldiers. But it should be a complete lesson. Check out the “Aftermath and trial” and “Retaliation against German prisoners” sections of this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre
Back in the last century, in ’68, I remember staring at a little swastika pendant that a beautiful Vietnamese girl was wearing around her neck. I asked her about it and she explained to me as best she could (like most GIs I knew about ten words of Vietnamese) that it had something to do with her Buddhist faith. It seems the symbol had a different meaning long before Hitler approprated it.
Yeah, I note that Wikipedia says: “The swastika is also a Chinese character used in East Asia representing eternity and Buddhism.”
Perry Bible Fellowship plays it for laughs.
Wow, I’m thinkin’ this is definitely a case where each one of those is worth 333.333 words of what I’ve said. I’d like to paste that triptych right into the posting, in fact. Thanks much for that link!
Something I particularly like is that, while the swastika is obviously the wrong way round (“left-facing”), it’s on its corner, in a diamond position – as all Nazi swastikas were.
It’s hard to use words like “correct” and “original” in connection with the Third Reich’s corporate identity, but here are a few details:
People often assert that Hindu swastikas face left while Nazi swastikas face right; not true. Hindu/Buddhist swastikas can face either way; the two orientations have slightly different meanings but both essentially convey good fortune.
Sorry, actually “Nazi swastikas face right”, on its own, is a correct statement. Original (by which I mean Hitler’s crew, not white supremacists etc) Nazi swastikas are always in a diamond.
Wow, I’ve just combined my inability to write decent sentences before 1pm UK time with a po-faced lecture on a horribly sensitive subject.
On a slightly lighter note, I’ve never liked my initials.
Here are some pre-war sports teams rocking their <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Native_American_basketball_team_crop.jpg"good luck symbols.
HTML disaster. Try again. Team Swastika
Swastikas left, swastikas right, diamond swastika…It sounds like choreography for the big musical number in “Springtime for Hitler.” I’ve got to get that picture of the basketball team framed and hang it in my office. It would make a strong statement. Of what, I’m not sure, but perhaps it would become clearer over time.
Aaand…goose-step, goose-step, goose-step, aaand…wow, I can’t name a single dance move. I feel pretty good about that.
This put me in mind of the ancient Roman “thumbs up/thumbs down” confusion perpetuated by Hollywood. Whether or not we put a man to the sword is quite a decision, and if the symbol has been completely reversed… well, I guess he still has a 50% chance.
At any rate, let me be up in the shadow of the vomitorium looking down, rather than gazing up at the blood thirsty crowd waiting to see if they know their history.
http://www.news.ku.edu/1997/97N/SepNews/Sept29/thumbs.html
According to Ibn Khaldun, It is in human nature to lean towards violence. I d personally add cruelty. And there is nothing more violent and cruel than he who contemplate but does or says nothing…